Special to CosmicTribune.com, May 17, 2025

The following excerpt from Chapter 12 of ‘What I Saw at the Second Coming, Part II,‘ is dedicated to Sun Myung Moon and the young people he inspired, who established a daily New York City newspaper with only two months notice, publishing the first edition on December 31, 1976.

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As the forerunner of The Washington Times, the New York Tribune served until 1991 as the only anti-communist daily newspaper in New York City. Like the New York Times, it gave emphasis to international news and culture unlike typical American newspapers of that time.

But conservative? In the “Big Apple?” The bastion of liberal Democrats?

As the editor, during an interview in his office, I invited the late Mayor Ed Koch to write a weekly column, his first. He enthusiastically agreed. Koch was a liberal Democrat but defended the Tribune at borough meetings, calling it the most pro-Israel newspaper in town, despite its affiliation with the Unification Church. More than most politicians of that era, Koch loved the press and cultivated them.

Another prominent New Yorker in that era also dedicated high priority to the media but focused on television, which he once called dangerous. His name? Donald J. Trump.

The ‘Silent Sensation’

In such a liberal city, the newspaper’s primary constituencies included marginalized groups such as the East Side Conservative Club (which counted Donald Trump as a member) and the “Captive Nation” ethic communities including especially Soviet emigres.

One such Soviet émigré, Lev Navrozov, ironically understood the value and mission of the New York Tribune better than most of its American staff as detailed later in this chapter.

I also became friends with the Russian-American family of retired humanities professor Arcadi Nebolsin who introduced me to his young nephew Peter Klebnikov who had interned at the New York Times. I hired him in 1984.

What follows is a little-known but significant story.

Born in New York to an aristocratic family of Russian émigrés, Peter and his beloved brother Paul had the “right stuff.” [Paul later became the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes. His still unsolved murder in Moscow in 2004 came to be seen as a fatal blow to investigative journalism in Russia.]

Peter’s first assignment originated with a tip I got from a Jewish columnist who headed the “Morality in Media” organization about a property in Little Italy managed by the husband of Geraldine Ferraro, John Zacarro.

As the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in the 1984 presidential election, Ferraro was key to Walter Mondale’s chances. The Left saw the first female vice-presidential nominee representing a major American political party as key to its strategy to unseat President Ronald Reagan.

Peter brought in his first story on his first day and subsequently wrote a series which would win a national award from the Investigative Reporters & Editors. Note the following reference in the Wikipedia entry for Ferraro:

“The New York Tribune, followed by The Philadelphia Inquirer and a few other mainstream newspapers, went even further in their investigations, reporting that Zaccaro was the landlord of a company owned by pornography tycoon and Gambino crime family member Robert DiBernardo. Many other newspapers minimized their coverage of possible connections between Zaccaro and the mob, however, and law enforcement officials downplayed the allegations.”

The story created a silent sensation in the national press corps. I was reliable informed that the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times had investigative teams following up. With a couple exceptions, no major newspaper including our sister newspaper The Washington Times published its findings or credited the New York Tribune.

After election day, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw wrote the following on Dec. 5, 1984, under the headline: “Press and Ferraro: A Case Study.”:

The New York Tribune published the first story purporting to “link” Zaccaro with organized crime figures — a story disclosing that a company in which Zaccaro holds a 50% interest was leasing two floors in a seven-story warehouse in the Little Italy section of New York to an affiliate of a company described by law enforcement authorities as the largest printer and distributor of pornographic material in the country. In the early 1970s, state and federal investigators had said the company, Star Distributors Ltd. was controlled by organized-crime figures.

Because the New York Tribune is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — many journalists were initially skeptical of the paper’s story. But reporters who looked into the allegations found the basic information to be true.

Ralph Blumenthal, a New York Times reporter who was working on a profile of Zaccaro and his business interests, saw the Tribune story, for example, and did some investigating on his own. Blumenthal himself had already uncovered a few bits of information about Zaccaro’s business that he thought suspicious and — having previously written about Star Distributors and organized crime — he found it hard to believe that Zaccaro didn’t know who his tenants were.

Shaw went on to criticize the national press corps, including his own newspaper for essentially ignoring the story.

Blumenthal, he noted, was told to rewrite his report, downplaying the Star Distributors angle which appeared in the last two paragraphs of the story which ran on page 20 of the July 26, 1984, edition. Shaw’s own paper, the L.A. Times ran the story three weeks later on page six which quoted Zaccaro’s vow to “take immediate action” if necessary to terminate the lease of Star Distributors.

The Crusade to Close the New York Tribune

Editorial achievements such as the above were kept secret from the ownership of the newspaper.

That fact seems unbelievable but understandable when considering the enormous resources being dedicated to The Washington Times, which had begun publication one year earlier in 1983. Its management team headed by Col. Bo Hi Pak regarded the New York newspaper he had once headed with hostility. After all, The Times needed all available financial resources in its life and death struggle for credibility as Sun Myung Moon’s newspaper in the nation’s capital.

Like Rodney Dangerfield, the New York Tribune didn’t “get no respect.” It never had a dedicated business division and ranked low on the priority list for the senior management team in New York City comprised of Pak loyalists.

This team dedicated all resources and focused all reports to its upline on an array of business ventures that included commercial real estate and printing. Another top priority for this team was to actually close the New York Tribune despite the Founder’s repeated rejection of such plans. The smart money in the Unification Church community saw the powerful logic behind putting all its money behind the effort to establish a journalistic beachhead in the nation’s capital.

The first major effort looked to be a slam dunk. Sun Myung Moon faced incarceration at Danbury Federal Prison in 1984 after being subjected to devastating character assassination and the twentieth century equivalent of crucifixion. Funds were tight, The Washington Times was a sensation, and top church and business leaders were deadly serious. They organized a showdown meeting at the East Garden estate in Westchester County between a team from The Washington Times and a much smaller delegation from the New York Tribune, namely the author.

The Founder’s inner circle, spearheaded no doubt by Col. Pak, wanted him to streamline operations in this time of crisis. I found myself first on the firing line. Why, Sun Myung Moon pressed, should the New York Tribune continue to publish? After stalling, pretending not to understand the translation, I simply replied that the money saved from closing the New York operation was negligible in comparison to the vast sums being poured into The Washington Times. Both newspapers were needed, I said. The Times provided an absolutely critical voice in the nation’s capital focused on making credible the long-ignored conservative side of the news spectrum. The New York Tribune, on the other hand, made its mark with editorial integrity in the Culture Wars and as an alternative to the world’s most authoritative but leftist newspaper — the New York Times. The Tribune would ultimately reinforce the credibility of The Washington Times. Sun Myung Moon clearly liked my argument.

The Founder then directed the same question to the leader of The Washington Times delegation. Unapologetically and emphatically, he said bluntly: “Close the New York Tribune.” The Founder’s immediate response? “Sit down.”

After surviving this test, the Tribune nevertheless barely survived a series of crippling cutbacks beginning the following year and operated on life support until suspending publication on Jan. 4, 1991.

After completing Part I of this book, I had a query about its archives from a former journalist for the New York Tribune who became a success at other newspapers and owned a successful business in Seoul. Upon checking with former executives of News World Communications, Inc. I learned that all archives including photos and microfilm had apparently been trashed when the Tiffany Building on Fifth Avenue had been sold. No News World Communications executive, past or present, took ownership of that decision.

As noted in Part I, “no one who had worked at the New York City Tribune would have been surprised.” But to not preserve the editorial assets of Sun Myung Moon’s New York City newspaper that among other things had published the historic “Reagan Landslide” election day front page prediction and which suspended publication in 1991 with the promise to return seems unthinkable. Maybe the archives are intact after all. It’s a big secret.

In any case I have established an online archive to restore and preserve articles published by The News World, the New York Tribune and the New York City Tribune.

The Unforgettable Lev Navrozov

As Chapter 3 of Part I of this book pointed out, the New York Tribune phenomenon is best explained by the “Siberian Jew Syndrome.” Columnist Lev Navrozov, the author of that observation, served as Chairman of the “Alternative to the New York Times Committee” and uniquely understood and could articulate why New York and America needed the New York Tribune. His life story deserves a book, but his obituary below makes for a fascinating read in the interim.

Emigre columnist Lev Navrozov, 88, sought to awaken American minds

Special to WorldTribune.com

January 23, 2017

Longtime WorldTribune.com and New York Tribune columnist Lev Navrozov died in New York on Jan. 22, his son said.

“The Orthodox priest who came to the hospice to administer the last rites could not do so, as one must repent one’s sins and the dying man was unconscious, but truth to tell, my father had no sins to confess,” Andrei Navrozov wrote to his father’s friends and admirers. He went on to explain that Lev Navrozov had “lived his whole life in a … cell of the mind, as close to monastic confinement as the profane world has to offer.”

WorldTribune.com editor Robert Morton called Navrozov “a formidable intellect who sacrificed the last half of his life in a valiant and unrelenting effort to awaken American minds to harsh realities outside the geopolitically sheltered United States.”

Navrozov was born to playwright Andrei Navrozov (after whom his son was named), a founding member of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who volunteered in World War II and was killed in action in 1941.

After studying at Moscow Power Engineering Institute, he transferred to the exclusive Referent Faculty of the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, a faculty created by Joseph Stalin’s personal order to produce a new generation of experts with a superior knowledge of Western languages and cultures.

Writes his son Andrei, “this was a man who, while a university student in Moscow, secretly studied forensic science to ensure that his vote against the Communist Party in the 1950 “election” — quite probably, the only such protest vote in the whole of the Stalin era — would not be traced to him through the handwritten bulletin.”

On graduation in 1953, he was offered a “promising position” at the Soviet Embassy in London, with the attendant obligation to join the Communist Party. He declined both offers and refused all government posts or academic affiliations as a matter of principle. Regarded as a unique expert on the English-speaking countries, he worked exclusively on a freelance basis.

Navrozov was the first, and to date the last, inhabitant of Russia to translate for publication works of literature from his native tongue into a foreign language, including those by Dostoevsky, Hertzen and Prishvin, as well as philosophy and fundamental science in 72 fields. In 1965, still freelance but now exploiting what amounted to his virtual monopoly over English translations for publication, Navrozov acquired a country house in Vnukovo, sixteen miles from Moscow, in a privileged settlement where such Soviet elites as Andrei Gromyko, then Foreign Minister, and former Politburo member Panteleimon Ponomarenko had their country houses.

In 1953 he began his clandestine documented study of the history of the Soviet regime, working on a cycle of books in the hope of smuggling the manuscript abroad. During this period, he published translations only, publishing no original work in view of the unacceptable limits imposed by censorship. In 1972 he emigrated to the United States with wife and son, after receiving a special invitation from the U.S. State Department arranged through the intercession of several politically influential American friends.

From 1972 to 1980 he contributed to Commentary magazine, including the 1978 publication of the bitingly critical articles “What the CIA Knows About Russia,” which Admiral Stansfield Turner publicly admitted he was unable to rebut.

In 1975, Harper & Row published the first volume of his study of the Soviet regime from within, The Education of Lev Navrozov. The book recounts the contemporary effects of Joseph Stalin’s public relations campaign in the aftermath of the assassination of rival Sergei Kirov.

“It bids fair to take its place beside the works of Laurence Sterne and Henry Adams,” wrote the American philosopher Sidney Hook,”… but it is far richer in scope and more gripping in content.” Robert Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra, wrote of the author’s “individual genius.”

Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, responded to “The Education” by using Navrozov as the model for a modern Russian dissident thinker in two of his books, thereby beginning a lively correspondence that continued until the American novelist’s death. In particular, the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak describes Navrozov, along with Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maximov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as one of his epoch’s “commanding figures” and “men of genius.”

After 1975, Navrozov published several thousand magazine articles and newspaper columns for the New York Tribune (later re-named the New York City Tribune), Newsmax and World Tribune which, however diverse the subjects drawing his attention and commentary, have a common theme, namely the incapacity of the West to survive in the present era of increasingly sophisticated totalitarianism He also served as honorary chairman of the “Alternative to the New York Times Committee” during the early 1980s and generated intense interest in the Soviet emigre community when he challenged an editor of the Times to a public debate at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

The editor did not appear and Navrozov addressed the audience on the need for a competing serious international newspaper in New York to refute the outsized influence of the N.Y. Times.

“Lev had the humility of a young child but was utterly incapable of compromising his integrity,” Morton said.

“He could be fun, describing as the ‘Siberian Jew syndrome’ as the tendency of conservatives to despise other conservatives with extra vehemence. And he despaired of ever reaching Americans who were obsessed, he said, with ‘fun, fun, fun!’ ”

Jewish by birth, Navrozov panicked during immigration in New York when spotting the space on the form after ‘Religion’. Not wanting to be on the next flight back to the USSR, he said he responded after much hesitation: “personal mysticism.” Near the end of his life, he requested baptism as a Christian, friends said.

Lev Navrozov was the founder, in 1979, of the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, a non-profit educational organization whose original Advisory Board brought together Saul Bellow, Malcolm Muggeridge, Dr. Edward Teller, Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, the Hon. Clare Boothe Luce, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Sen. Jesse Helms, and Eugène Ionesco.

Birth of a New York City Daily Newspaper

On the last day of 1976, Sun Myung Moon’s first U.S. daily newspaper published its first edition. Derided at the time as the “Moonie newspaper”, The News World responded to the deficit of experience among its staff of predominantly church member by hiring many “outside” news professionals whose numbers increased during the great newspaper strike of 1979.

Suddenly many journalists found themselves out of work and The News World as the only paper on the stands. Legendary New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote about one of his friends, (“Dirty”) Harry Stathos, who came to work at The News World during the strike.

When it hit, when the pressmen walked out of the newspapers and nearly everybody else streamed behind them, Harry Stathos reduced the complicated New York newspaper strike to its fundamental issues: How does Harry Stathos survive?

He went home that night and thought. “I work for a newspaper,” he said to himself. “Yes you do,” he answered himself. “What newspaper is there in New York?” he asked himself. “The Moonie paper,” he answered himself.

While home on leave as the paper’s Tokyo correspondent, I saw people on the subway reading The News World, the only daily newspaper on the stands, which featured one of my articles on Page One.

The News World stood out as the only New York City daily at that time to feature full-color photos and a modern design. It also emphasized foreign and investigative news reporting and pioneered a multi-page daily commentary section, a distinctive feature that later carried over to The Washington Times.

The News World won many New York Press Club and other journalism awards thanks in part to the tutelage of the late Thomas Duffy Zumbo, a crusty curmudgeon of a city editor who loved his young charges and was loved back. A losing bout with alcoholism had cost him his job at United Press International and after the suspension of The News World, renamed New York Tribune in 1983, it cost him his life as well. But during the happy years in between our metro reporters, with Tommy’s help, were on the beat.

An intense early debate among the primary stakeholders (Americans and Koreans, church members and “outside professionals”) in Sun Myung Moon’s foray into American journalism focused on positioning. Decisive voices, in addition to my own, included the senior management and the owner’s representative Col. Bo Hi Pak. The final authority was Sun Myung Moon.The major conflicts to be resolved were:

• Should the newspaper be a tabloid or a broadsheet. Should it compete with the New York Times or the Daily News?
• Decision: The paper existed to do battle with and prevail over the New York Times. Thus it was to be a Broadsheet with a serious-minded approach to news and opinion.
• Should the newspaper be unequivocally conservative and anti-communist or moderate and “center-right”?
• Decision: As the owner’s representative at the company shifted from Dennis Orme of Great Britain to Stanford graduate Michael Warder to Korea-born Col. Bo Hi Pak, it became crystal clear that the paper would be firmly conservative and consistently anti-communist.

Washington bureau chief Josette Sheeran and some of the most capable editors and reporters from New York moved to The Washington Times and the author remained as Editor in Chief and Vice President at the New York City Tribune.

The Silencing of the Alternative to the New York Times

The internal rivalry between The Washington Times and the New York City Tribune became so intense that it resulted in the suspension of the Tribune, which Bo Hi Pak and his American team saw as a foregone conclusion despite the Founder’s opposition. Financial subsidies always emerged as the central issue despite Sun Myung Moon insistence that both newspapers should be self-sustaining. My complaint in both New York and Washington that reporters and editors were losing their livelihoods because of failed business strategies fell on deaf ears. It was an article of faith that newspapers founded by a man believed to be the Messiah could never achieve profitability.

The New York operation got by on about 3-5 percent of the operating budget of The Washington Times. Thus its achievements, at a fraction of the outlays, caused cognitive dissonance and led to concerted efforts to prevent such reports from reaching the ears of the Founder.

[The real story emerged after the Tribune suspended publication on Jan. 4, 1991. See Chapter 13, “The Washington Compromise.”]

The silencing of the New York City Tribune on Jan. 4, 1991, like the death of the New York Herald Tribune in 1966 left the New York Times unchallenged as the “newspaper of record.”

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‘What I Saw at the Second Coming: Bloodline of Christ; The Big Story, Part II,‘ was published in October, 2024. Part I was published in 2023. [See Part II excerpts 1, 2, 3. Part I excerpts 3, 2, 1]

  Alternative to the NY Times: Its big story and the back story; The unforgettable Lev Navrozov